Start a campaign of industrial action with a one day general strike before the Budget

Another €15 billion in cuts and tax increases will just make this disaster even worse. ICTU says the “National Recovery Programme” will cause another 90,000 job losses. A deflationary programme of nearly €30 billion cuts/tax hikes over six years will guarantee mass unemployment and mass emigration for years to come.

Socialist Party MEP, Joe Higgins, refused to participate in a meeting between Irish MEPs and the Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn. MEP Higgins left the meeting after Mr Rehn stated he would only share essential information if all the MEPs agreed not to disclose the contents.

Sunday 21 November, the day the Irish government formally applied for a bailout to the EU and IMF, should be marked as the day that the Irish capitalist class were exposed as a rotten, despicable failure, bankrupt in every sense and incapable of offering any way forward. The significance of these developments cannot be overstated; they are a turning point in Irish history and will impact on other countries in Europe and the EU itself.

This past summer, Ireland’s Crisis Pregnancy Programme announced in its annual report that the number of Irish women travelling abroad for abortions is falling. In 2010 some 4,422 women gave Irish addresses at UK abortion clinics compared to 6,673 in 2001.

The capitalist media say that there is no alternative to the thrust of the economic policies being advanced by the government, the EU and the IMF. This is completely untrue. There is an alternative - a socialist alternative. Here socialistparty.net puts it forward in the form of a ten-point programme.

Simply put, the IMF, EU Commission and ECB are in Dublin today to carry out the dictats of the economic vampires in the Financial Markets. These faceless, unelected and unaccountable speculators seeking mega profits on the backs of working people have orchestrated the current crisis to force a bail out which secures their bad gambling debts.
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The Government and opposition parties have signed up to reducing the budget deficit to 3% by 2014. The government has now settled on the figure of €15 billion in cuts over the course of four years in order to achieve this stated goal.